[Editor's note: The following is the latest backgrounder from Food First's Dismantling Racism in the Food System series. It is excerpted from a section on Black Agrarianism included in 2017’s forthcoming book Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons. GEO thanks the authors and Food First for allowing us to share their work.]

This paper conceptualizes socialist construction as a process of incremental reclaiming from capital of those resources that can best be held in common so that members of a community can achieve their fuller human development*. Under democratic rules the community regulates the commons so as to ensure its accessibility and sustainability. The formation of cooperatives is an instance of the socialization of the workplace. By bringing workers together into self governing collectivities, cooperatives also contribute to the socialization of workers to a socialist moral order. In Cuba a

James Razsa talks with Josh Davis about the effort to establish Democracy Brewing in Boston, MA: a worker co-op brew pub, event center and organizing space. James also shares his thoughts on the relations between unions and co-ops, informed by his time working in both movements.

[Editor's note: Below are three interviews from CommonBound 2016, held in Buffalo, NY earlier this year. Interviewers Laura Flanders and Esteban Kelly talk with three women who are working to build financial and economic structures that empower people and communities. Click here for more videos from the conference.CommonBound is a project of the New Economy Coalition (NEC), a network of 150-plus organizations including PeoplesAction, 350.org, and the U.S.

As the online "sharing economy" devolves into poor labor conditions and monopolistic practices, the concept of "platform cooperativism" offers a hopeful vision for a more democratic online economy. This new wave of entrepreneurs, investors, and business developers are merging offline cooperative economics with the Internet in creative ways. We'll discuss how far this emergent movement has come, and explore some of the challenges it faces in the struggle for the future of the online platforms we increasingly depend on.

When you think of the work that needs to be done in order to transition to a restorative society, one that solves problems rather than creates them, one that regenerates living systems – what do you think of? Chances are there's plenty of such work to be done, all around us. And chances are that opportunities to get jobs doing that work are few and far between. But what if we built our new economy on exactly that work? We can.